Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [119]
She was struck by an appalling thought. “Is it near the jail? Would they have . . . ?”
“Cleaned up?” Oliver laughed. “Oates was a Mason. They’ll have him all laid out for a lodge funeral by suppertime.”
She went with him to get the water. “Why do you dip with the current instead of against it?”
“Get less junk in it that way.”
“You know so much.”
He did not reply, only held up his hand. Down below she heard the brassy chords of a band. “Isn’t that something?” he said. “A half hour after they get through the hanging they tootle out the old band and march up and down as if nothing had happened.”
Standing on the ditchbank looking down over the skinned gulch where the town lay fuming, she was face to face with the Western range. The late-afternoon sun rayed out through piled white clouds. Sweetened and mellowed by distance, the music rose up toward them, suggesting order, grace, civilization, Sunday afternoons on green commons. When the music paused, she heard at first only the whisper of the ditch, and then a deeper, farther sound, compounded of boots on hollow planks, stamp mills, voices, rumbling wagons–the sounds of Leadville’s furious and incessant energy. She was thinking of Oliver associated with that productive frenzy, herself as an ally of the music, the two of them together as part of something new and strong.
With the dripping pail in his hand, Oliver watched her, smiling. “Now tell me the truth. Can you manage here, or shall we take you to the Clarendon?”
“Oh, here!”
“You don’t think you’ll get lonesome, away from other people.”
“I’ve got my work. And you said they aren’t people I should live with.”
“We can ride, it’s grand country. Frank or Pricey can take you if I can’t.”
“Who’s Pricey?”
“My clerk. Oxford, don’t you know. Penniless incompetent Englishman.”
“Why it sounds absolutely social. Can we have evenings?”
Squinting against the flattening sun, his eyes were crinkled at the corners like the most flexible leather. The smile hid under his mustache. “How about one tonight?”
Maybe she would have blushed, maybe they would have had a great exchange of speaking looks on the ditchbank, maybe she would have silently rebuked him for unseemly intimations, maybe she would have become giddy, and run, and got him chasing her on that wide-open bench lighted like the stage for a pageant. How would I know? The altitude does peculiar things to people. The one thing I do know is that the misunderstanding that had begun on the pass that morning was all rubbed away, and they began their Leadville life in a state of euphoria.
4
Even in a Leadville cabin she was coddled.
Those first chilly mornings, she lay in her cot and watched sleepily through her eyelashes as Oliver squatted by the Franklin stove in his undershirt, his suspenders dangling, and blew the coals into flame through a handful of shavings. His movements were quick and sure, he worked intently. Above the darkness of his forearms and below the sunburned line on his neck his skin was very fair. When he opened the outside door the fume of his breath was white and thick, and the vicarious chill made her burrow deeper in the blankets. For a moment he stood there pail in hand, a rude, unidealized figure against a rectangle of bright steel sky–fully adapted, one she could trust to take care of things, a Westerner now of a dozen years’ standing.
The door slammed, she heard him running. In two minutes he was back, the door banged inward, the pail sloshed over as he stepped inside. By that time she had decided to be awake.
How would she have looked, waking up? Because I never saw her anything but immaculate, I can’t imagine her with mussed hair and puffy eyes, particularly when she was young. No curlers, I assume, not in 1879. If she curled her bangs, she curled them with a thing like a soldering iron, heated over stove or lamp. A nightcap? Perhaps. I might go to Godey